Delivering a megaproject requires careful planning, expertise, and collaboration. As public funding is secured and project organisations are set up, the challenge arises of successfully managing and executing these ambitious ventures. 

Organisations are often being set up with the sole purpose of delivering a single project, but these teams can be small and lack experience delivering major projects.

Peter Zuk, a project executive for Atkins, explains how public organisations tasked with delivering projects have changed, “Public organisations generally have moved away from having an all singing all dancing organisation for the delivery of projects, they’re more selective, they’re more economical in the amount of staffing that they keep in place. So often, if an organisation is pursuing a large project, they are going to look for a project management organisation.”

In the past, organisations would hire project or delivery managers with relevant experience to lead the project. However, this can lead to the client organisation losing control of important decisions. Now a new model has emerged in Europe, emphasising collaboration and control. It’s called the delivery partner model.

Zuk got his start in the industry working as a project manager on the Boston Central Artery project, known as the Big Dig. He found the existing delivery manager structure to be suboptimal, so he made some changes.

“I wrote a project plan that called for an integrated project organisation that mixed public employees with private employees, keeping public employees responsible for solely public functions, and delivered the project in that way. And in many ways, that’s a precursor, if you will, to what was called the delivery partner role.” 

Defining the Delivery Partner Role

There is no standard definition of the role of a delivery partner. Richard Robinson, CEO of Atkins UK and Europe, emphasises that the role is flexible and tailored to the client’s specific needs. Essentially, a delivery partner is a trusted project management entity that works closely with the client, ensuring the client retains control while benefiting from the partner’s expertise. It is a relationship built on trust and collaboration.

Zuk describes the delivery partner as “a form of project management. It is from the project management family. It’s simply a more advanced form, and it’s one that really speaks to clients wanting to keep themselves the centrality of being in charge of a project, while at the same time having the resources to be able to do those things that are necessary to assure delivery.”

Every project has unique characteristics that influence the nature of the delivery partner’s role. Factors such as the size and expertise of the client organisation, as well as the project’s scope, shape the partnership. Robinson explains that clients must determine which areas they are best suited to lead and which aspects require the support of a delivery partner. This crucial decision-making process helps align the partnership with the project’s goals.

Robinson was also COO of HS2 when they were bringing on a delivery partner, “If you look at HS2 that is —given the size of the job—a relatively ‘thin’ client organisation: circa 1500–2000 people, but much of that augmented through delivery partner organisations.” 

With a relatively small organisation, they had to decide where a delivery partner would lead and where HS2 ltd would retain control. “So HS2 for example, is a very long linear scheme. So you can start to imagine that geographical boundaries are going to be important, you’re going to need to split the job up into certain pieces of geography to manage. But then you can never get away from cross cutting things to join the whole railway up. Switches, rail systems are the obvious ones, utilities, land acquisition, environmental approvals, they’re all things that are there for the whole job.” 

Integrating the delivery partner

Once the scope of the delivery partner’s role has been decided, then it’s time to create the team that will deliver the project. Robinson explains, “So you will take certain people you’ll have, you will have your client org chart, you will use your delivery partner contract to fill gaps in that org chart where you’re struggling to recruit overall.”

Depending on the role of the delivery partner and the strengths of the client organisation, how the delivery team is structured will vary, Zuk says. “The delivery team would become fully integrated in in a way which was driven by the owner themselves, whether that’s, you know, a small group at the top of an organisation or a large group marbled throughout the organisation, but the role of that delivery partner would be to understand embrace and be able to participate in delivering the vision of the owner of a project.”

With two organisations effectively merging into one, ensuring that the delivery partner is a good cultural fit with the client organisation is crucial. Major projects take years to deliver and strong relationships can be built between those working together.

Kurt Goddard is the head of rail and transit in the US for Atkins, and he knows how important collaboration is on major projects, “It’s got to be a very tight collaboration. A delivery partner is working in very close concert with the owner, and you’re going to build those very personal relationships over time. Sometimes, people become lifelong friends on these projects.”

Sharing a legacy

Major public projects don’t just have an internal culture a delivery partner needs to work within, they must also share the same external legacy goals.

Zuk worked on the London 2012 Olympics in a delivery partner model and says it was well suited to everyone working towards the success of the project and can create a sense of unity and purpose among team members.

“On the London Olympics, we called it the Olympic effect, that there was something special about coming together to do the important thing of having everything in place that needed to be when the Olympics opened. It’s something that everybody could embrace. When you talk about legacy, if you were part of that it’s something that you’ll always remember. A characteristic of large public infrastructure projects or large projects generally is they take up a big portion of people’s lives. If you have participated in one, it’s usually a highlight of your career.”

Due to the importance placed on collaboration, Robinson believes a client organisation should include a behavioural assessment during the procurement process for a delivery partner. “I think, as a procuring organisation, as a client organisation, having a behavioural assessment element to your procurement. The main thing is just sending a big signal, that behaviour and how you work together is really important to you.” 

Maintaining control

The crucial distinction of the delivery partner model is that it requires the client organisation to remain in control off important decisions while leveraging expertise from larger more experienced delivery organisations.

The traditional delivery manager role often leaves the client organisation with a more hands off role.

“In many cases, the client looks for the programme manager, just to come in and tell them what to do. They’ll just take over the project for a client and then basically turn it over when it’s done. But that’s not the delivery partner model,” says Goddard.

However, particularly for public bodies, maintaining control and accountability over decision making is important, Zuk explains, “The leaders of public organisations are accountable to the public. The decider of last resort has to be the public owner and in fact, in most cases, that is legally required.”

The delivery partner model has only begun emerging in recent years. However, it is already being adopted widely across projects in Europe and it is beginning to also be used in projects in the United States.

“The delivery partner model has been used outside of the US for some time now. I would say that the model is becoming more prevalent. It has been used a few times in rail and transit already. California High-Speed Rail, for example, used the delivery partner model for their programme management. Also, I know that there are other clients that are entertaining this model to deliver major rail infrastructure projects in the US. So, it is catching on, and I think it’s a better way of doing things,” says Goddard.

But Zuk believes that many organisations still have a lot to learn about what is really required from a delivery partner. “In my experience, there’s a soft side of partnership and a hard side of partnership, both of which need to be present in a successful delivery partner situation. The soft side is that the delivery partner needs to adopt the values and in a public organisation, those can be about transparency, those can be about engagement of stakeholders, those can be about inclusion of groups in the process, those things are going to be important to an organisation in selecting a delivery partner. If the job is solely to do the job and not embrace values, that wouldn’t be a good match for some organisations. So you need to embrace the client’s personality if you will be able to deliver the goals of the project.”